Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US.
The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water positive — replenishing more water than it uses — by the end of the decade. It recently disclosed some information about its water use, but we still have an incomplete picture of the company’s impact as a whole.
Amazon announced the launch of a Colorado River Basin Collaborative today, with a mission to “create one of the biggest corporate water conservation efforts for a single U.S. watershed.” It expects to raise $100 million over two years — including the $20 million investment from its own coffers — for water conservation efforts.
The Colorado River brings water to 40 million people
Stretching 1,400 miles, the Colorado River brings water to 40 million people across seven states in the Western US and and two states in Mexico. The waterway has faced “unprecedented” drought over the last 26 years, according to the US Bureau of Reclamation. Decades of overuse on top of human-caused climate change have exacerbated the problem. To cope, the US Department of the Interior finalized a plan in August imposing steep water cuts on Arizona, Nevada, and California.
As the first stop for most goods the US imports from Asia, California is home to more Amazon warehouses than any other state.
